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St
Margaret, Cley

It
is repetitious to observe that East Anglia was
the industrial heartland of late medieval
England, or that this nation was a devout
Catholic country at the time, or even that the
collision of these two facts resulted in some of
the most spendid church architecture in Europe.

Virtually
every parish church in the land bears some
evidence of this, but it is particularly obvious
in the centres of power of those times: at
Lavenham in Suffolk, where the great wool
merchants held court, at Salle and East Harling
in Norfolk, where great landed families competed
to influence the crown, and here at Cley, once at
the harbour mouth of Blakeney Haven, the great
north Norfolk conurbation of ports, where the
streets thronged with wealthy merchants and their
workers.

Today, the
harbour is lost to us, but you can still make out its
shape if you stand in Wiveton churchyard and
look back across to Cley, half a mile off. At Blakeney
itself, the quayside survives with some of its buildings
to help a reconstruction in the mind; but Cley has
nothing now except its church and a few cottages, a
village green and a windmill. Ironically, you wouldn't
even know that the sea was close.

Of the
four churches of Blakeney Haven, St Margaret was the
biggest, grandest and most expensive. It is still all of
these things today. It is replete with all those elements
we find most exciting when we visit a medieval East
Anglian church: a seven sacrament font, bench ends
depicting people and mythical creatures, brasses, bosses,
stalls and the most elaborate niches in the kingdom, a
smattering of old glass, and stunning tracery that, being
Decorated rather than Perpendicular, is unfamiliar in
East Anglia. We have explored elsewhere on this site, in
the introduction to
Salle and Cawston, exactly why these churches were
built so large and elaborate. Well, St Margaret is
another stunning testimony.

The
setting is lovely, on a gentle rise above the
village green. The graveyard is scattered, many
of the stones 18th century, and not lined up in
clinical rows by misguided 1970s lawn-mower
enthusiasts. If you come in late spring the
graveyard is uncut, full of wild flowers and tall
grasses, but in this September morning it was
neat and trim, a velvet mount for the church.

What you
see is, at first sight, complex. The vast nave
with its aisles and clerestory is all of a piece.
The offset tower is rather mean, and although it
seems likely it was intended for rebuilding, the
huge and beautiful west window suggests that it
would have been in the same place. The chancel is
also curiously simple, and eventually would have
been replaced. Two transepts stick out to north
and south, the southern one roofless and
glassless, that to the north entirely ruinous.

The
merchant de Vaux family were responsible for rebuilding
the church, and the new nave was built to the south of
the original nave, which was then demolished and replaced
with an aisle. You can still see its roofline on the east
face of the tower. The master mason was WIlliam Ramsey,
one of the most significant in England; the Ramsey family
were responsible for the Palace of Westminster and parts
of Norwich Cathedral. Work began in the 1320s, and
proceeded quickly until the building was pretty well
complete by the mid-1340s. This is an early date for the
complete rebuilding of an East Anglian church, and shows
that here, in Blakeney Haven, the new money was early. It
would not be for a hundred years that Suffolk and south
Norfolk families were in a position to do the same. Why
was this? Partly, the wealth of the Blakeney Haven ports
did not depend just on East Anglian cloth. But there was
another, more apocalyptic factor.

Before
Ramsey could turn his attention to the chancel
and the problem of that blessed tower, a new and
frightening pestilence reached England. For
anyone living in a port, diseases brought from
abroad were an everyday hazard that had to be
balanced against full employment and
opportunities for wealth creation. Even so, this
was something on a spectacular scale, a strain of
bubonic plague that reached the south coast ports
in August 1348 and that by the dismal late winter
months of 1349 had reached Norfolk. Perhaps half
the population died, although in the ports there
seems to have been a higher survival rate;
perhaps there was more immunity due to previous
exposure. However, Ramsey and his son both died,
and the work of the ports was disrupted for
several generations. The Victorians, relishing
the gothic horror of the disaster, looked back
from their own cholera-plagued century and called
it the Black Death.

Half a
century later, trade, confidence, and a renewed obsession
with the cult of the dead led to more money being
lavished on St Margaret. This was the time that the
mighty south porch was built, a Perpendicular fortress
that guards, rather uneasily, the Decorated entrance. The
church was further furnished with a mighty rood screen,
elaborately carved woodwork, and glass and a seven
sacrament font intended to assert the official doctrine
of the Catholic Church. By the early sixteenth century,
Cley church was at a peak of its glory, but very quickly
those times were to tumble.

The
English Reformation brought to an abrupt end the
need for bequests, and all work on developing the
building stopped. And, state protestantism would
sow the seeds that would help England emerge as
an insular, capitalist nation, changing patterns
of trade, and doing away with the need for
Blakeney Haven, pushing Norfolk back into the
relief of a long, agricultural sleep.

So, you
take a walk around the outside of St Margaret,
the window tracery a text book of the way English
architecture developed over the centuries. The
most beautiful is that in the south transept,
elegant lights that build to a cluster of vast
quatrefoils. This was competed on the eve of the
Black Death, and is probably at the very apex of
English artistic endeavour.

But I
think that it was never filled with glass. I can see no
evidence that the transepts were completed in time for
their use before the pestilence, or that there was ever a
need to use them after the recovery from it. And, then,
of course, the Reformation intervened.

You step
into the church through the south porch, with its
flanking shields of the Holy Trinity and the Instruments
of the passion. Above, in the vaulting, are bosses. One
shows an angry woman chasing a fox that has stolen her
magnificent cockerel. Another, curiously, shows a man and
a woman beating the bare buttocks of a third figure.
There is also an Assumption - you can see all of these
below.

Grand
Perpendicular is so common in East Anglia that there is
an unfamiliarity about the nave that is breathtaking, a
feast for the senses. The west end of the church has been
cleared, creating a cathedral-vastness, and the light,
while not gloomy, does not have that white East Anglian
quality familar from Perpendicular buildings. The smell
is of age rather than furniture polish, a creamy dampness
that recalls former business rather than decay. The
honeyed stone is also somehow foreign in this heartland
of flint. It affects the sound in a different way. The
building demands a certain amount of awe that is not just
due to its size.

We arrived
about an hour before a wedding was due to start, and as
we explored the building we saw preparations build, the
pews begin to fill, the minister and choir begin to robe,
until we felt we were intruding, and left just as the
bride arrived. But while I was not completely distracted
from documenting the building, it was a reminder to me
just how important weddings have become to the Church of
England, not just in terms of the income they generate,
but as a last bastion of the grounding of Faith in
ordinary people's lives. They may no longer have their
children baptised, they may no longer come on a Sunday at
all; but marriage is the place that simple Christianity
touches their lives - that, and their funeral, of course,
although increasingly people are more militantly aetheist
about death than they are about love.

The seven
sacrament font looks rather lonely in its clearing, and
is not the most spectacular of its kind, although the
imagery is a little unusual. The Last Rites, (NW) appear
to show the Priest lying on the bed on top of the dying
man. Confession (NE) shows the Priest and confessing man
facing each other across a shriving bench. Confirmation
(E) is the most compelling of all, because it appears to
show a tonsured Priest rather than a bishop blessing a
group of people that include children and babies. Mass
(SW) is shown from behind, the Priest elevating the host
while the acolytes on either side kneel and hold tapers.
The eighth panel is lost, but was probably the
Crucifixion.

The most
spectacularly un-East Anglian feature of the church are
the great image niches that line the arcades. They are huge.
Beneath the pedestals are depicted figures, including
musicians (one plays a fife and drum), St George
dispatching a dragon and a fearsome lion with a bone.
There are traces of original colour, and they are simply
spectacular.

More
homely are the bench ends, including a beautiful mermaid,
several figures reading books, and a poppyhead carved
with a face sticking out its tongue, of a type sometimes
called Scandal, although I have never been
convinced by this. There are many brasses, some in the
north aisle and others scattered around the south door,
including one stunning fragment depicting a group of six
weepers.

In the
north aisle is a fascinating collection of donated and
collected ephemera, some suggesting that in the recent
past this was a fairly Anglo-catholic place, including a
beautiful Russian Orthodox cross. I rushed around taking
photographs while the church filled with wedding guests.

And
so, it was time to go. I decided that I was
impressed by this church, but that I didn't love
it. Looking around at the splendour of William
Ramsey's work, at what survives of its elaborate
furnishings, and sensing the echoes of the rich
sacramental life it once hosted, I had a sudden
vision of apocalypse - not of the Black Death so
much, as of the end of a way of life replaced by
something so wholly different in a few short
years of Reformation. This church had been built
for so much more than congregational worship, but
this was all it could now do; as if the Anglican
community was camped out uneasily in its ruins,
in the vastness of something so wholly beyond
their imagination.